Madness
by Magery
Summary: Because life isn't always full of chocolate and butterfly kisses and chestnuts roasting on an open fire.


**No, sometimes it fucking _hurts_.**

* * *

There's an odd kind of silence in her screams. The kind of silence where it doesn't matter how loud she is, doesn't matter if she howls with an agony to match the way she feels because if anyone's listening they don't care. It's a cruel fucking world and sometimes she wonders what she did to deserve this, but then the darkness comes slinking back in alongside her nightmares and she remembers in _excruciating_ detail exactly what it was that landed her in this hellhole.

Everything's cold, icy tendrils constricting her veins, her breaths, her soul, reaching in, grabbing thieving taking, stealing away even the _memory_ of what it was like to be warm. Sometimes she wishes it would take her too, that she could just surrender to the abyss and maybe the pain would go away, but she knows in her heart of hearts that she _deserves_ what she gets.

She's so alone, trapped in her cell but imprisoned in her memories, brutal reminders of the fact she's a fucking monster haunting her every waking moment like the shadows haunt the corners of her room, like the blood and gore and darkness haunts her fitful sleep. It's funny, sometimes, to remember what she once was and compare it to what she is now, funny because she knows she's only started to appreciate the life she had then because of the life she has now _it's not really life, more like a precursor to the hell she's going to when she finally dies but it's not like she gives a shit either way. _She's fucking crazy now and she knows it, but crazy doesn't excuse anything.

She's a—_killer murderer child-slayer_—bad person, and she knows admitting it won't change anything, but she does it anyway because the pain doesn't hurt as much when it feels more like penance. So she keeps screaming until her lungs can't take it anymore and she collapses to the floor coughing, then gets back up and starts all over again because life's a vicious fucking cycle and who is she to defy nature _she already has because mothers don't do what she's done._

Nobody ever comes to visit her. There _is_ nobody to come to visit her. That's why she's here, after all, because Tom Marvolo Riddle has nothing on her; she's a demon, a horror, a sin in human flesh and she fucking knows it too.

After all, there's an odd silence to her screams because no matter how loud they are they can't drown out her children's.

* * *

He's watching her through a two-way mirror, watching the woman who used to be—_still is always will be so what the impossible distance between them?_—his other half as she howls like an animal, like something _broken_, and he doesn't fucking know why. He's probably spoken to every medi-wizard in the world by now and none of them can explain how someone so vibrant can turn into _this_, this stupid fucking mockery of a woman who burned so bright comparing her to fire would be like comparing the sun to a candle.

All they can tell him, from snatched fragments of mumbled conversation as she pants air back into her lungs before screaming again, is that she thinks she's killed him, thinks she's killed their children which is fucking stupid because their eldest son is clutching onto his hand, their youngest hiding behind his brother and their daughter is asking him what's wrong with mummy and he _can't fucking answer_ and it's burning through him like her eyes used to do except that was never pain.

He's lost, confused, already shattering at the seams because he can't even look at the son he named after his fathers or the son he named after the bravest men he's ever known and especially not his red-haired daughter without being reminded the fact she's not there _and she never will be again Merlin why is his life a constant hellish symphony of pain and loss and suffering what more could he possibly do to earn a happy ending?_

He can't talk to his best friends without being reminded one of them is related to _her_ and it seems his entire life is confined in a series of unrelenting nooses because it's like _every fucking person_ he's ever been friends with knows her or knew her and why do they still have to be here when she's _not_?

Their kids will grow up now with only a broken father, because how can he function when she's not by his side and he wonders if maybe one day he'll hate her for being so weak, for taking away everything they could have had, and he knows it's illogical because she would have done _anything_ to come back to them and where this delusion came from he doesn't know _he blames Tom Riddle and the Diary and everything else this fucked-up world has put the two of them through because who fights a war at sixteen?_ All he knows it that it fucking _hurts_.

But, he thinks as he turns to go because he can't bear the sight of someone so profoundly _alive_ turned into a lifeless husk, no matter how much he'll come to hate her, he'll always love her more.

He's not sure which is worse.


End file.
